British media: China is accelerating to become a "science giant"

Reported on June 15 by the reference news website The Economist published an article entitled "China has become a scientific superpower" on its website on June 12. The full text is compiled as follows:

There is a patent wall in the lobby of a scientific research building of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. There are more than 100 certificates on the wall. These certificates are arranged in order. A row of bottles are hung under a velvet rope. In the bottles are the seeds, the innovative achievements protected by these patent certificates.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences and research institutions all over China have conducted a lot of research on the biology of food crops. In the past few years, Chinese scientists have discovered a gene that can improve the growth ability of crops such as sorghum and millet in saline alkali land, and a gene that can increase the yield of maize by about 10%. Last autumn, farmers in Guizhou completed the second harvest of genetically modified giant rice cultivated by scientists of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The rise of plant science research is not an isolated case in China. The Economist once conducted a survey on China's scientific research and asked whether China could one day become a scientific superpower. Today, there is a clear affirmative answer to this question. Chinese scientists have recently gained advantages in two highly concerned high-quality scientific indicators, and the growth of China's first-class research achievements shows no signs of slowing down.

One way to measure the quality of scientific research in a country is to count the number of influential papers produced each year. According to the data of Kerui Weian, the number of such influential papers published in the United States in 2003 was 20 times that of China. By 2013, the number of top papers in the United States was about four times that of China, while the latest published analysis data of papers in 2022 showed that China had surpassed both the United States and the European Union.

China now leads the world in other indicators. China ranks first in the nature index ranking - this index compiled by Nature Weekly counts the number of papers published in well-known academic journals. When the index was first launched in 2014, China ranked second. By 2023, China has risen to the top.

According to the ranking list of the number of scientific research achievements compiled by Leiden University, there are now six Chinese universities or scientific research institutions in the top ten of the world, and six Chinese institutions in the top ten of the natural index ranking list. Their names may not be widely known in the West, but please get used to treating Zhejiang University, Shanghai Jiaotong University and Peking University as universities of the same level as Cambridge and Harvard.

According to the natural index and the index cited in the paper, today China is leading the world in the fields of physics, chemistry and earth and environmental science.

Applied research is China's strength. For example, China's papers on perovskite solar cells are far ahead. In terms of converting sunlight into electricity, this technology can provide a conversion efficiency far higher than that of traditional silicon cells.

In addition, China has more patent applications than any other country. In combination with cheap energy, China's strong industrial base means that physical innovations such as materials can be rapidly put into mass production.

China is also demonstrating its scientific strength in a more significant way. Earlier this month, China's Chang'e-6 probe was controlled to land in a huge crater on the back of the moon, shovel up some rock samples, display a Chinese flag and then set off to return to Earth. If it successfully returns to Earth at the end of this month, it will be the first time that a human probe has successfully brought back samples from the hard to reach side of the moon.

The growth in the quality and quantity of scientific research in China seems unlikely to stop. The expenditure on scientific and technological research is still increasing - the government has announced that the central level scientific and technological expenditure will increase by 10% in 2024. And China is cultivating a large number of young scientists. The number of first-class AI researchers trained at the undergraduate level in China is 2.5 times that in the United States. It is estimated that by 2025, the number of science and engineering doctoral students trained by Chinese universities will be nearly twice that of the United States.

There is no indication that China, a scientific giant, will not continue to grow stronger. Simon Makinson, who studies higher education at Oxford University, said: "It would be extremely unwise to predict the peak of the Chinese miracle, because so far it has no limit." (Compilation/Cao Weiguo)